Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship

Collusion and Evasion

Alf Lüdtke

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137442765
• eBook ISBN: 9781137442772
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Oppression and violence are often cited as the pivotal aspects of modern dictatorships, but it is the collusion of large majorities that enable these regimes to function. The desire for a better life and a powerful national, if not imperial community provide the basis for the many forms of people's cooperation explored in this volume.

Part I

Scope and Perspectives

1

Introductory Notes

Alf Lüdtke

How the project evolved

This collection of essays shares its origin with many similar publications. It began with a scholarly conference convened and organised by Professor Jie-hyun Lim (Hanyang University, Seoul) and his colleagues at the Research Institute for Comparative History and Culture (RICH) titled ‘Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship’. The organisers proposed as the specific focus ‘Desire and Delusion’, emphasising in their invitation the impact of programs and schemes issued by the dominant for a better future for ordinary folks. The discrepancies between grand plans and actual results would, however, stimulate widespread discontent with, if not resistance to, the ruling bodies and their policies. The conference papers and the ensuing debates they sparked showed that the principal distinction between the dominant and the dominated missed crucial elements of both mass dictatorship and people’s everyday lives. It is this concept that takes up the proposal to analyse rulers and domination as a rather open field of forces and social practices. The key to this argument is that the so-called dominated are oftentimes (very) active in determining the course of events, asymmetries in resources or means of action notwithstanding. Moreover, the proposed focus did not take notice of ordinary people’s genuine desires, longings, or anxieties. Imaginaries of the future were therefore not only the prerogative of those who occupied the ‘heights of command’. Two contributions to this meeting in particular provided concrete examples for both points: Charles Armstrong’s outline of the reconstruction of North Korea after the Korean War in the late 1950s, and Harald Dehne’s reconstruction of practices of consumption in East Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s and 80s.

These discussions were inspiring and opened up many fields of research. In particular, the forms and tactics of cooperation and collusion with the mighty and their agencies, whether in metropolitan dictatorships or in post-colonial regimes. Still, the work on the volume did not follow directly from there. The multiple daily demands of the contributors’ respective scholarly environments intervened. It was only in 2009 that we were able to restart the project. Five of the chapters in this volume are substantial reworkings of the conference papers: Charles Armstrong, Harald Dehne, Peter Lambert, Alf Lüdtke, and Kevin McDermott. The seven other contributors were recruited to participate in this endeavour: Paul Corner, Dennis Galvan, Won Kim, Michael Kim, Richard Rathbone, Andre Schmid, and Michael Wildt.

The finalised volume follows a well-known pattern: to explore a wide-ranging theme through studies that focus on one particular region or (nation-)state. The reader is invited to reflect on possible relationships and trace resonances between the included studies. It is only in this way that comparative insights may become possible. Certainly, in this context comparison does not necessarily entail the strict pursuit of one specific item or even a limited number of similarities. Cases in point may be the edited volumes The Modern Girl Around the World, or less global in scope, Beyond Totalitarianism, the latter of which closely compares German Nazism and Soviet Stalinism.¹

In our volume we present a mix of two types of studies. The first group consists of assessments of European dictatorships: Italian Fascism, Soviet Stalinism and German Nazism. In addition, two case studies explore facets of Japanese imperialism, primarily during the Second World War. Another piece traces consumerism in post-Stalinist East Germany. In the book’s subsequent section the reader will find five studies discussing non-European post-colonial settings. Three of the contributions deal with North or South Korea. Thus, East Asia is one ‘dot’ on the landscape under scrutiny here. By contrast, we offer two explorations of West African sites: post-colonial Senegal and post-colonial Ghana. Again, we hope that this approach will invite readers to consider yet another set of differences and similarities outside the usual purview. One of these issues may be the lasting impact of the colonial encounter. Is not ‘coloniality’ (Walter Mignolo) a recurrent feature of the very efforts to overcome colonial domination and exploitation? Certainly, the lacunae are immense, but nevertheless research is, to a large extent, just that: triggering new questions and demanding further research.

Everyday life: Anytime, anywhere

Historians of everyday life are interested in people’s practices.² What do they do, and how do they do what they do, on workdays and on holidays alike? How do they win their bread? How do they encounter space and time and appropriate those as spatiality and temporality? How do they play out (or subdue) friendships with, and hostility towards, work mates or neighbours, family and kin?

‘How’ questions unsettle binaries as they criticise seemingly clear cut distinctions and homogenous notions. Take for instance, the Berlin blockade of 1948–49. Common wisdom holds that the three western sectors of Berlin were totally blocked from any connection to the West for eleven months. In this view, only the airlift of the western air forces managed to counter the devastating cut off of train, truck, and boat connections.

Meanwhile, recent research on the everyday practices of Berlin’s citizens have revealed the broad range of smuggling, as of barter-connections.³ They also show that Soviet border controls existed around West-Berlin but allowed for exceptions. In addition to this, certain segments of industrial workers and office employees lived across the respective borders and were almost impossible to police around the clock. In other words, the term ‘blockade’ stands for a political myth and thus obscures the effort to get an adequate sense of people’s experiences and practices.

At the same time, the study of everyday life tries to grasp as many details of people’s activities as possible. Such details do not matter for nostalgic or antiquarian reasons, although those never can be totally ruled out. The specifics, however, of a certain configuration or a specific moment become visible or tangible (or even audible) when the concrete manner in which one who kept a notebook scribbled his or her thoughts is scrutinised for its every detail: is it a first scribbling or does the writer take obvious care in putting down each letter? Does he or she employ color marks for specific entries? How does she or he refer to an outing with friends or a speech given by a political dignitary or other important figure?

It may be a truism by now, but the history of everyday life does not refer to a ‘field’. Rather, it stands for a perspective applicable to every issue or question, object, or theme. The contours of this perspective remain fuzzy because the items too often overlap. Thus, the effort to explore subtleties and nuances ironically faces people’s ‘muddling through’ (Steege), i.e. the multiple grey areas of ‘neither/nor’ actions and choices.

Such a view focuses on the ways and means historical actors dealt with the settings and environments with which they were confronted. In other words, whatever individuals or collectives are doing (or neglecting) and how they do this has become central to the study of the everyday. The (re-)making of one’s livelihood and the ways of transforming or destroying it are also central objects of interest, and the spectrum of means and practices that are part and parcel of (un-)doing the everyday has no limits.

Research must examine physical exaction, from hands and feet to muscular strength – yet at the same time one has to register people’s speech, songs, writing, and visual presentations of any sort. It is the interplay of people’s corporeality with their mental, psychic, and emotional faculties that has to be taken into account.

Several aspects are crucial here. For one, people’s subjective dimensions are a major focal point. What are the ways people encounter and perceive the situations with which they are confronted? How do they cope, respond, or ignore the incentives and demands they face? Moreover, can one trace experiences and feelings as well as anxieties or longings related to the present or future?

In Western thought, the individual subject has held the pivotal position since the 17th and 18th centuries and was considered the ultimate and unshakeable fundamentum of mankind. More recently, historians of the working classes have considered human agents as the pivots of resistance against the influence of the ruling powers for comprehensive control and unlimited exploitation of everyone they could bring under their control. Totally lost in such an account is a whole range of human longings and activities that enjoyed the cruelty of torturing people – and oftentimes the related killing – especially of collectives that had been branded as outcast or unworthy of survival. Uncovering the pleasure of inflicting pain and death is part of the quest to uncover the subjective dimensions of individuals and groups.

Surprisingly, (self-)critical appraisals of an understanding that considered the subject the homogenous basis of every human expression and action went unnoticed in such research. But psychoanalytical deconstruction did become rapidly influential from the late 19th century on among literary authors and in some areas of the humanities. Historians, however, did not join forces with them. They ignored or despised any dismantling of age-old certainties. What’s more, post-colonial studies have recently shown that the notion of a coherent or undivided individual does not work too well in – broadly speaking – non-Western contexts. Dipesh Chakrabarty has explored notions and practices of ‘sociality’ that demonstrate the intricate overlappings of what Western views consider individual and collective. He discusses this with an example from colonial Bengal and shows the multiple-facets of this kind of sociality in the ‘Adda’ (a semi-private sphere and space mostly among bourgeois males).⁴

Also related to this is the situational. What did the concrete setting look like to the historical actors or agents? Did they exist in solitude, in cramped urban living quarters, or in tightly-knit neighborhood or village contexts? How can we unpack their religious offerings and needs? How do people find and situate themselves in the asymmetries of power, violence, economic opportunity, and status? Or even closer to home, what did their living spaces look like? Were there paths, or streets and roads? Were there railways, ports, and/or airports that were part of their concrete everyday lives?

Thirdly, how did they do what they did and how did this relate to their manifold aspirations and anxieties? To what extent did people experience pain or pleasure, toil or delight when doing what they did? What were their physical actions like, and what imprint did they leave on people’s bodies? How did this resonate with people’s feelings? In this sense, the question of ‘how’ easily touches on what is so difficult to obtain: information about specific practices and understandings of work and non-work that may have been self-evident decades ago but are now gone, and to a large extent, actually forgotten.

Here, a fourth element comes into play: these investigations are pursued by both professional and amateur researchers. How do they approach their interests and questions? And how open are they about their observations of the observed, who may act strangely on some matters that may just remain mysterious or enigmatic? To what extent do they – and do we try – to establish an open dialogue with the observed? Of course, in most of these instances there are no reciprocal partners of observation left alive in the contexts we are trying to research. At any rate, it is necessary to be particularly attentive to the limits provided by our source materials and the traces on hand.

Finally, our focus on the specificity of issues and source materials allows us to scrutinise the ambivalence, if not multivalence, of both historical actors (and their contexts) and of the researchers themselves. The effort to critically assess one’s own impact on the object of research is not only important for ethnographers or oral historians. Rather, this kind of awareness enhances the subtlety of one’s research approaches as well as the results they produce.⁵

To be more concrete as to the historical actors: was the pride of Korean forced labourers in Japan during World War II enforced by the situation they were in, or were they driven by the effort to beat the conditions, if not the coloniser, in the long run (see in this volume the contribution of Michael Kim)? Or is the gardening activity of a German industrial worker in one of Germany’s central armament factories of the Third Reich a constant retreat into a niche, or was it a contribution not only to his family meals, but also to the war effort at large? Moreover, how can we grasp the ‘shifting involvements’ (Hirschman) of these historical agents?⁶

Individuals may meander from mute subservience at their workplaces to a range of active engagements: as a member or captain of an amateur sports team, or as a player in a music band, for instance. They may have become very outspoken in the context of work when they encountered forced labourers in the close vicinity of their own workplace or even directly in the next aisle, as happened during World War II. This is readily apparent in the settings that are dealt with in this volume: forced Korean labourers in Japanese armament factories who did not blink when facing their authorities, but who managed to establish a second tier of hidden everyday life and strictly forbidden pleasures in gambling and so forth; or take the young women who were recruited to South Korean factories in the 1970s and 80s who endured physical and even sexual violence on a large scale; they also maintained a stern face to keep their wages for their families at home and to finally achieve recognition as worthy compatriots. And the Ghanaian cocoa farmers not only meander, but were present on two levels at the same time: public acceptance of the ever-worsening regulation of their markets and concealed activities of managing at least some of their harvest to make a little profit of their own.

Of course, observations about various forms and rhythms of meandering allude to a potential that may be activated, but very often seems to be ignored or wasted. At any rate, people’s ‘shifting involvements’, whether individually or in small or larger groups, directly obstruct seemingly brazen structures as they did in European state-socialist societies in the summer and fall of 1989. In these cases dictatorships impl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: Scope and Perspectives
• Part II: Dictatorial and Colonial Regimes 1930–1960: Practices of Domination and Modes of Appropriation
• Part III: Postcolonial Settings 1950–1990: Dimensions of Subjectivity
• Index